Energy Insecurity and General Health Status

Introduction

This project is motivated by a central question: how do household energy challenges influence general health status across U.S. communities? Energy insecurity — from difficulty affording utilities to living in unsafe indoor temperatures — can create chronic stress and shape overall wellbeing. Understanding this relationship is important for recognizing energy access not just as an economic issue, but as a meaningful public health concern. We include two related indicators, Energy Insecurity (EI) and extended Power Outages (PO), to help illustrate how energy vulnerability varies across states. Below, an interactive map allows you to explore EI and PO patterns across the United States.

Interactive Energy Map

Explore variation in energy insecurity (EI) and power outages (PO) across U.S. states.

Project Overview

Proposal

Research Plan & Objectives

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Our project begins with a clear research proposal outlining the key questions and scope.

• Objective: To investigate the relationship between electricity insecurity and general health status.
• Hypothesis: Regions with unstable electricity supply may show higher incidence of specific health issues.
• Methodology: A statisitcal method on a quantitative analysis.

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Data

Collection & Processing

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We gather and clean data from multiple sources to build a reliable dataset.

• Sources: Energy records, public health databases.
• Key variables: Energy insecurity conditions and general health status outcomes.
• Tools: R for data wrangling and integration.

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EDA

Exploratory Analysis

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We explore the data visually and statistically to identify patterns and anomalies.

• Techniques: Summary statistics, correlations, and components comparisons.
• Visualization: Scatter plots, maps, and distribution charts.

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Model

Statistical Modeling

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We build models to formally quantify the relationships in the data.

• Approaches: Regression models, multivariable analysis.
• Validation: Train/test splits and cross-validation to assess performance.
• Focus: understand whether and how energy insecurity contributes to poorer health outcomes, and which variables most strongly influence these relationships.

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Report

Communication & Reflection

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The final report presents a clear narrative of our project, summarizing the motivation, methods, results, and key insights that link energy insecurity to general health status outcomes across the U.S.

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Shiny

Key Findings

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The Shiny app offers an interactive way to explore the data and results, allowing users to visualize patterns, compare states, and engage with the findings in a more intuitive format.

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🎬 Video Overview

We created a short video to provide an overview of our project and help viewers quickly understand its main goals, methods, results and insights. This visual summary offers a clear and engaging way to explore the key concepts behind our work, making the project more accessible to a wider audience.

Our Team

Liutong Li

Bohan Zhu

Yuanbo Dai

Haoyang Chen

Feel free to contact us